Perhaps aware that topping the elasticated mayhem of Dragon Ball Super: Broly was too tall an order, director Tetsuro Kodama's follow-up, Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero, takes the series in a different visual direction entirely. The Broly movie presented itself as a labour of love: a tremendous, near-feature length, super-fight animated in such a way that every action, every gesture, was reaching for the spectacular. Super Hero swerves this pin-up aesthetic to push at a style of three-dimensional computer animation that is (judging by the pre-feature ads) knowingly toyetic. Unlike Takashi Yamazaki's Lupin III: The First though - another legacy manga series making a similar technological leap - Super Hero hasn't allowed this new method of communication to dictate terms. Although not as punch drunk as its predecessor, Super Hero does conclude with the same hyperbolic action that defined the franchise's traditionally animated instalments.
Kodama's film, working from a screenplay by series creator Akira Toriyama, uses its three-dimensionality to become untethered. This playful approach to framing is reflected within the storyline itself: Red Ribbon scientist Dr Hedo (the impressionable Grandson of long vanquished bad guy Dr Gero) has created a tiny cyborg bee named Hachimaru that snoops around the doctor's enemies, unnoticed. Super Hero's camerawork employs the same sort of skill set, offering a perspective that swirls and darts around these never-still characters and the spaces they inhabit. Rather than be locked into a series of set-bound medium shots, Kodama's viewpoint is free to move around and explore. So, instead of manufacturing a series of finely lit backgrounds, Toei Animation has created massive pastel environments; enormous, cute, science fiction spaces that have been plotted in such a way that they seem to invite an interactive-level inspection.
Super Hero also departs from the norm in terms of its subjects. The focus of the Dragon Ball Super television series - the friendly (but overwhelming) rivalry between Son Goku and Vegeta - is tidied away from the main threat, allowing ancillary cast members their time in the sun. Toshio Furukawa's stoic alien Piccolo gets the most shine, the film's dramatic shape adapting to the former God's scheming approach to a bubbling threat. Unlike the Saiyan characters, who often stand around waiting for danger to present itself, Piccolo actively investigates, calling in favours, wearing disguises, and using emotional manipulation to get results. So while Super Hero plays inconsistent with recent animated adaptations of the Dragon Ball manga (the last volume of which was published in 1995), the film's mix of cunning and comedy is actually closer to the works that Toriyama has produced since: Sand Land, in which Lucifer's teenage son battles with a post-apocalyptic paramilitary to return water to the wasteland and Jaco the Galactic Patrolman, a Dragon Ball spin-off about a highly strung alien policeman who crash-lands on Earth.